A Bad Man (18 page)

Now
I am alone.

Don’t say that Feldman was unwilling to go along with the program.

What
is
the program?

The clever warden didn’t do things haphazardly. There was significance in the placement of each water cooler. (Hadn’t he seen the bills? Eight hundred twelve dollars for replumbing, for pulling out the old pipes and settling them in a new pattern.
Why?
) He supposed he was meant to go over his sins, to parse his past like a grammarian. It was the old wilderness routine. They’d left him in this desert to think about things.

Feldman refused to think about his past. If that was the warden’s purpose the man was out of luck. People don’t remember what has happened to them, he thought. You couldn’t even remember how you felt. Unhappiness was always neutralizing itself. Likewise joy. So that the past had no character—neither of pain nor pleasure. It gave the impression of something canceled out, a sort of eternal breaking even. It was like what happened with the leaves. In the first flush days of spring, he couldn’t remember when the trees had been without leaves. Again in autumn it seemed as if they had never had them. Even this experience—if I outlive it, he thought—will neutralize itself. It was a kind of fallout. Too much was lost. Too much was lost even of his neutralized life. He knew that you were supposed to be able to store in your subconscious everything that had ever happened to you. How many slices of cake you’d had at your eighth birthday party, the names of all the people you’d ever met. That if they gave you truth serum you’d spew all this stuff back. He didn’t believe it.

He sat up and pinched his arm. Remember this pinch, he commanded himself, squeezing. Remember the date and the hour and the exact pain, and on the anniversary of the pinch a year from now, five years, ten, fifteen, think about it. Try to remember to remember it on your deathbed.

He released his flesh, and instantly the pain thinned out, was absorbed, halved, quartered, sixteenthed. He couldn’t have taken up exactly the same flesh in his fingers again. It was as if he had thrown a stone into a lake. In seconds he could no longer identify the precise spot where it had gone down.

“Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.” Who said that?

If he had difficulty remembering, he had none at all imagining. On about the third day he began to fantasize. He thought much about girls and women and kept himself exhausted by yielding to every sexual impulse, building the foundations of his lust always on real women—girls who had worked for him, his buyers’ wives, customers to whom he had given his personal attention. Sometimes, however, at the moment of climax, he swiftly substituted some film goddess, or girl seen on television, or a record sleeve, or a billboard, or some girl never seen, some college woman from books and imagination.

He became almost animally potent, yet remained somehow in control, cool enough to build his fantasies carefully, starting again if he made a mistake, constructing what he said to her, what she said to him. It was a more careful wooing than any he had ever done in his life, and he saw himself in a new light, gallant, charming. He held off climax and teased himself with manufactured complexities, sudden jealousies—seeing himself deep in love, smitten till it cost him. Together, he and his girl friend worried about new places they could go, and later, what they were to do about their affair, how the children were to be told, how it was to be broken to the husband, to Lilly. It was marvelous. All that disturbed him were those occasions when his carefully managed, highly organized affairs were interrupted by random, spontaneous introductions of new women—the movie star, the imaginary TV singer—as unplanned and unprovided for as a freak in nature. At these times all his cool will would be suddenly broken and as he came he groaned the erotic words, invoking flesh almost violently, spraying his sperm, fucking completely. Cunt, he thought, oh pussy, oh tits and oh, oh, ass!

But even taking into account these aberrant moments, robbed of the gentle consummation he had planned, he realized that he had never had so active nor so satisfactory a sex life.

It’s a goddamned love nest in here
.

He was illimitably free to plunder and profane. In his unvisited cell, with all the privacy he could want and all the time in the world, he had enough for the first time in his life. Oddly, however, it was through just these fantasies that his real past was finally evoked. Why, he remembered suddenly, it’s exactly the way he had lain beside Lilly!

He could see himself—himself and Lilly—the two big people huddled in their corner of the bed. They should have had a king-size bed. Feldman had asked for one, but Lilly had said they didn’t make king-size in French Provincial, that it would look ridiculous. “But they had all the kings,” Feldman said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Lilly said.

Feldman thought bitterly of the small kings, the teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy kings of France.

And twin beds would somehow have strengthened the appearance of their consanguinity. He didn’t even ask for twin beds. He thought of Dagwood and Blondie, of the husband and wife on “The Donna Reed Show,” of Lucy and Desi, and all the conjugal Thompsons and Richardsons and Wilsons and Morgans in America in their twin beds, in their rooms within rooms—each with his own table, his own bedlamp, his own electric blanket; each with his own slippers beneath the bed, the polished toes just sticking out, like the badly concealed feet of lovers in farces. Such things bespoke order, reason, calm. Paradoxically, they bespoke a sort of detached tenderness for the mate that Feldman had never felt. Twin beds were out. (But they did say that love was more exciting in a twin bed. Feldman wondered. It raised penumbral questions like what happened at sea when in the mixed company of a life raft somebody had to go to the bathroom. How did two unmarried archeologists, holed up in a cave, hiding from savages, take a crap? The shipwrecked and the archeologists and the coed Yugoslav guerrilla fighters, they were the ones who had the fun. Policemen raiding wild parties, firemen rescuing ladies in their nightgowns from burning buildings,
they
did.)

So they lay together in the regular double bed, Feldman pulling back his knee when it brushed Lilly’s thigh, creating a space between them, imagining the space a distance, making that distance into a journey he would never willingly take. She could have been in Europe, in Asia, in craters on the moon. And wild.
Wild!
As unfaithful to Lilly right there beside him as some philanderer at a convention across the country.

He waited until she slept. It was easy to tell. She was a deep breather. (She breathes for six people, he thought.) Then, silkenly sheathed, luxurious in his mandarin’s pajamas, he would begin his fantasies. (Feldman picked out his pajamas like a pajama scientist. No millionaire, no playboy, no bedroom sybarite has pajamas like mine, Feldman thought.) If Lilly happened to snore at one of these moments, he experienced the most intense irritation. If she snored a second time, he poked her, jabbed her with rigid, extended fingers in some soft part of her soft body. “Close your mouth,” he’d hiss. “Get over on your own side.” And in her sleep she’d obey. (Lilly listened in her sleep. Sometimes he’d give her pointless commands and watch with interest their clumsy, torpid execution. It was like playing a great fat musical instrument, some giant bellows thing.)

He never permitted himself the luxury of an orgasm, gradually abandoning, as sleep encroached, his carefully arranged trysts, his logical seductions, losing his place, forgetting to touch himself, until finally his erection waned like an unstoked fire.

And Lilly never knew, (Pure kindness on his part, for in truth he didn’t give a damn what she thought.) If she had ever discovered his teen-age games he would have laughed in her face at her disgust, since it was her fault anyway. Because she was unbeautiful. Because her body harbored a traitor to love which pushed up bumps, jellied her flesh, dilated the veins on the backs of her legs. She was wrapped in her skin like a bad package. Everywhere there were excrescences, tumescences, body hair, cold pale scar tissue the blood never warmed, black-and-blue marks which arose from no ever-identified origin. She gets them from drying herself with a towel, Feldman thought, from dressing, from sitting in drafts.

Because Lilly was unbeautiful. Unbeautiful. And because she didn’t care. She accepted every blemish—they’re benign, she reasoned, they’re all benign; she was benign—forgiving herself. Because she had no vanity. None at all. (No. One. A-line dresses to conceal her big hips. And he didn’t mind big hips. He
liked
big hips.) What he hated was the strange combination in Lilly of fragility and a peasant heart. When she visited her parents in the East she would sit up for two nights in the coach. Or she took a bus. “I don’t mind buses,” she said. She
didn’t
mind buses, but the air conditioning gave her a sore throat. She didn’t
mind
a sore throat. He took her to expensive restaurants. She ordered liver. Thick steaks gave her heartburn, she said. Thick
steaks
did. A play came to town. Feldman bought seats in the orchestra; she preferred the balcony. Sitting close gave her headache, she said. Feldman wished she were beside him now. He would give her one in the back with his fingers. Unbeautiful Lilly!

Aghh
, he sounded like a night-club comic. But what if all the tasteless jokes were true? What if they were true? Lilly made them true. She made them
come
true. She was like a fairy. Lilly the joke fairy. Poor Lilly, Feldman thought. Till death us do part, you. And
why? Just give me one good reason!

Because during the war, when he was putting his store together, when 4-F—the homunculus wrapping his heart—he was getting rich, he had no time: 80,000 miles in ’42, 112,000 in ’43, 100,000 miles in ’44, 128,000 in ’45, in ’46, 215,000 miles and in ’47 even more. Getting the stock, traveling where the goods were, riding the trains—endless, endless—riding the planes, bumping full colonels, the whole country on the take, “table” a dirty word, and under it where the action was. A United States Senator told him once, “We know what you’re up to and we don’t mind a bit. During a war these things have to happen. It’s an abstract factor but very important. It keeps up morale. You sell your wares, and the people on the home front, the factory people and the civil servants and the fillers-in, buy them and it gives them strength. Most people get their strength from the things they own. We have to keep up the balance between guilt and strength to get them to produce. The war news isn’t enough. That just takes care of the guilt. So we know how you manage and we don’t mind a bit.” But the Senator was wrong. Because genius went beyond mere bribery, beyond shaking hands all around on an insinuation, beyond favors and winked eyes and the inference of evil like a secret between friends—though he did all that too, did all of it, though mostly in the beginning, folding bills into hundreds of palms, using cash like a password or a message from spies. (
Cash, cash
, the whole country crazy for cash, the only thing they’d touch, wanting no records, his far-seeing countrymen, those practical folks. What the
hell
, it couldn’t last forever. Nothing could last forever, not even greed.)

Because the Senator was wrong. Because genius was genius. There was something physical in it too. Feldman took risks. (What, are you kidding? All those miles in all those airplanes in the forties? The cities blacked out, radar not perfected yet? Remember those plane crashes in the forties?) He was there, ubiquitous, making his pitch. Looking over the operator’s shoulder while she sewed the last seam; among the toys, sneezing over the teddy bears; his feet the first ones up on the sofa when it came from the shop. In the small-arms factory too. He was the first merchandiser to sell government surplus on the open market. And
during
the war! The first department store in America to offer a magazine-subscription service. Food departments. Virginia Sugar-Cured Ham departments. Setting things up. Collecting his merchandise. Inventing it. Johnny on the spot, picking over America, the rummage champion of World War Two, hearing the rumors, getting the word (“St. Louis has shoes”; “There are baskets in Vermont, dishes in Portland”; “Carolina has hats”). Tours through the plants. (And not just those innocuous preserves where they turned out the belt buckles for civilian consumption—the other parts too, to see what he could use. His suits on those days had holes in the lapels and over all the breast pockets from the badges he had to wear.) And this isn’t just New York City and Chicago and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and St. Louis we’re talking about. We’re talking about places in Nebraska and the Dakotas and southern Indiana and Montana and Idaho and small towns in Dixie. Places with lousy accommodations for travelers and rotten food. And you can’t always get there from here. He got there. Feldman got there.

But he was busy and didn’t meet girls. Except those who worked for him. And life wasn’t exciting enough, kissing the ladies in the big black hats and black dresses, the buyers in long black gloves, those boozers and flatterers and users of make-up and smellers from perfume. Feldman’s buyers. (After he had set up the
possibility
of buying, established that there was something to be bought.) Feldman’s girls, who were taken to lunch. And got fucked at the gift shows, wooed in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, in the showrooms of the McAlpin Hotel in New York, in motels that were no bargain along the highways on the outskirts of those two-bit towns Feldman had rummaged. (Well, didn’t I tell you? Genius
is
more than just being able to put down a cash bribe. Cash, cash, that’s all most people know. Take a little risk, have a little fun. And pussy leaves less record than cash. Feldman’s buyers were famous.)

But he had a sense of humor and wished to parody his situation. (It is in the long sad tradition of my people to pluck laughter from despair.) And then he met Lilly in New York City in 1949 in the Pennsylvania Hotel at the wedding of the son of his handbag supplier. She was the kid’s aunt. She was infinitely boring, but she didn’t have on a big black hat, and she had never been to a gift show. Feldman had never been so excited. He needed something special or he would go mad. (The war over four years. Nothing for him to do. The way he saw it, those fools in Washington would
never
bomb Russia.) Lilly’s unspecialness was spectacular. He grew breathless contemplating it. What a mismatch! The two people stuck with each other—if they married—miserable together for the rest of their lives. Miserable in some important domestic way that Feldman had never known. A mystery. They would tear each other up. That would mean something. A little grief would mean something.
Excitement, excitement, give me excitement. Give me Sturm and give me Drang. Wring me out. Let me touch bottom. I don’t care how. Thrown from the rocks, keel-hauled or shoved off the plank. Let me go down, down to the depths, further than fish, down by the monsters, the spiky and fanged. God, give me monsters. Scare me, please!